Saturday, November 05, 2016

Ben Badler makes the case against raising the international minimum signing age to 18.

There will still be some Latin American players who can get to the majors at 21 and hit free agency still at their traditional peak years, but raising the signing age from 16 to 18 reduces the number of them who will. That hurts players in the union—and not just Latin American players. While international amateur players aren’t in the union, the players’ association would be smart to push back against ...

As the game of baseball continues to globalize, major league organizations are looking beyond the prospect hotbeds in the Americas. For many organizations, this includes scouting in Taiwan, which 16th-century Portuguese sailors dubbed Formosa, “The Beautiful Island,” owing to its natural fusion of green fields, forest ranges, mountain tops and water bodies.
The San Diego Padres, for example, recently signed Taiwanese pitcher Wen-Hua Sung, who turned 20 in September. Sung, whom the local ...

The usually reliable John Gambadoro of Arizona Sports is reporting that the team will name Boston Red Sox bench coach Torey Lovullo as the new manager of the Arizona Diamondbacks. While there has not yet been an official announcement, the choice has since been confirmed by others, including Nick Piecoro and Jon Heyman, so it appears to be close to a done deal. Lovullo will become the 10th manager in team history.

This is no great shock: as soon as Red Sox GM Mike Hazen was appointed to the ...

Or, if we want to look at it another way, relievers threw 43% of all the postseason innings this year. That’s up from 39% a year ago, and over the last five years, it had held pretty steady between 35-40%, right in the same range as the 63%/37% split we see during the regular season. It certainly feels like this year is the start of a shift, and teams are going to continue to push their bullpen usage in October, especially given how well it worked this year.

Spoiler alert! There’s no single great answer to that question. Complex spoke to every living professional baseball player who’s come out publicly: Conroy and Denson, plus four others who came out after retiring, and all of them had somewhat different takes.

“I think people are misguided in thinking that it’s connected,” says Billy Bean, the one-time major leaguer who came out four years after his pro career ended and wrote a book about everything, now serving as Major League ...

Ed Barrow, president of the International league, in speaking of the decline of interest in baseball…declares that interest in the game could be greatly revived by requiring the visiting players to travel to the park via busses and fully dressed in their uniforms. He deplores the many automobiles and the large bank accounts that players have nowadays, and attributes much of the lack of interest in baseball to too ...

It’s never, ever been about being right. It’s always about being better. It’s tough to get better if you believe you have all the answers. By questioning everything, including what you believe to be true, you remain open to change and improvement. Theo has always gotten this.

Baseball has been solved, and the solution is simple: There is no solution. It’s when you think you’ve got the game figured out that it bites you in the ass. There is always more information to be had, and more ...

“The bullpen will be interesting to see how it comes together,” Williams said. “The market is going to make it challenging. There is not a ton of options available, and there are a lot of teams talking about needing bullpen help right now. We just have to be careful that we don’t get swept up in a market that is overheated. We’ll monitor that market and try to find value.”
Creative bullpen management was in focus throughout the postseason, with ...

Quieter scenes remain from this famous evening. There was an instant where we saw, amid a row of standees, Jack Epstein held in the right arm of his dad, Theo, the Cubs’ president (and the inventor and curator of this team), his arm around his dad’s neck and everyone’s eyes fixed on the doings below. Later, Manager Terry Francona’s post-season interview in the silent Cleveland clubhouse was a model of grace and generosity, but standard for him. I also caught a very ...

Game 7 was watched by 40.045 million last night on Fox — the best any baseball game has done since 1991.

Last night’s Game 7, which lasted 290 minutes including a 17-minute rain delay, also was up 70% in viewership compared with the most recent World Series Game 7 broadcast, in which the San Francisco Giants beat the Kansas City Royals on October 29, 2014.

If the BIS scorers are working off game video, that’s a problem. One of my complaints about watching games on TV is that they rarely show defensive alignment. UZR “stringers” can’t include where a player started if those stringers aren’t actually at the games; like everybody else, they’re at the mercy of what TV chooses to show them.

Ask the people in uniform about Hosmer’s range and you’ll hear his range to his glove-side is about average, while his range to his arm-side is ...

Players are ranked based on how I expect teams will view them, not on how I view them myself. Essentially, they’re ranked from predicted biggest contract to smallest, not accounting for options.

All ages are as of April 1, 2017.

1. Yoenis Cespedes (31, OF, Mets): It couldn’t have been a very difficult call; Cespedes will opt out of the final two years of his three-year, $75 million contract and seek a longer contract after striking out on getting a five- or six-year deal in a crowded ...

”Vin and I made plans in the spring of ’66 to have dinner when we later had the Dodgers on our broadcast schedule,” Gowdy remembered pensively. “As our date approached, I called Vin to finalize details and he abruptly told me that dinner was off. He had apparently found out that if the Dodgers win, his television role would be reduced. He was obviously not happy about the decision.

“I was surprised by Vin’s reaction but understood it. Heck, the World Series was then sports’ ...

It’s a tradition like no other. OK, maybe not at the level of The Masters, but this is certainly very cool.

After the Royals won last year’s World Series, the San Francisco Giants sent 25 pizzas to the Royals. The Giants were the defending World Series champions and they had received pizzas the year before from the Boston Red Sox, who won the title in 2013.

So the Royals are paying it forward.

Toby Cook, the Royals’ vice president of publicity said the team is sending Giordano’s deep ...

The Cubs bats picked Maddon up. They turned his decision to pitch Chapman in the previous game a footnote.

Maddon called on closer Aroldis Chapman with two out in the bottom of the eighth inning with a three-run lead, but Chapman - who had thrown four innings and 62 pitches in two previous games - surrendered three consecutive hits, including a game-tying home run by Rajai Davis.

“Chappy is our guy in that moment,” Maddon explained. “We narrowed it down to four outs. If you want to really ...

Federal Judge Landis is declared by a morning newspaper to-day to be the choice of several major league baseball magnates for chairman of the national commission in case that position should be vacated by August Herrmann. The attitude of Judge Landis on the subject, however, was not stated, the jurist apparently not having been advised that his name was to be brought into the list of possibilities for the position.

When he took the pitch off his mask and stumbled around, I thought he had suffered a concussion. It was surprising when they didn’t come out to check on him. Then he hit a home run.

Unbelievable.

“Win a World Series in your last year when you know you’re going out and you’re a backup catcher,’’ Ross said, “and these guys treat me the way they do and the city shows me the love it has shown me and you’re a part of one of the greatest games in the history of baseball and breaking ...

“I’m truly just honored to be part of Major League Baseball,” Epstein said after the hug broke up. “I grew up a fan, loving the game, and not being good enough to play, so to be part of a Major League Baseball is incredible. To have the privilege of working with two organizations like this is something I never thought I’d have, and to be a part of winning World Series in both places is something I will always treasure and won’t take for granted. ...

The Indians made it tough, erasing a 5-1 lead in Game 7 and tying it on Rajai Davis’ eighth-inning home run. A 17-minute rain delay before the 10th inning saved the day. Outfielder Jason Heyward called the Cubs hitters into the weight room, and general manager Jed Hoyer watched as the players regrouped.

“I think the rain delay was the best thing that ever happened to us, to be honest,” Hoyer said. “We went down to the rain room, talked a little bit. [Cubs president of baseball operations Theo ...

I grew up in Jacksonville, and have fond memories of going to the Jacksonville Expos (later the Suns) games at old Wolfson Park. I’ve made it to their new park last year, and it’s a nice enough place. As for the name change, honestly I’m more irritated by the stupid logo than I am the unwieldy name.

For his part, team owner Ken Babby offers some particularly egregious corporate speak by way of explanation: